May 31: Sacco and Vanzetti

Felix Frankfurter, a future Supreme Court justice, was in court for the opening of the murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in Dedham, Massachusetts on this date in 1921. The trial, Frankfurter would report, involved “systematic exploitation of the defendants’ alien blood, their imperfect knowledge of English, their unpopular social views and their opposition to the war . . .” Sacco, a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fishmonger, had been active in anarchist circles since arriving in the U.S. from Italy in 1908. They would be convicted of murder in a payroll robbery and executed in 1927. That year, in an Atlantic Monthly article, Frankfurter called Judge Webster Thayer’s denial of a motion for a retrial, following a confession to the crime by ex-convict Celestino Madeirosa, “a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations . . .” Justice Louis Brandeis, however, declined to get involved in the case because of his close personal relationships with members of the Defense Committee. The fate of Sacco and Vanzetti became a major cause for leftists and liberals around the world; among those who protested the executions were Albert Einstein, Dorothy Parker, an elderly Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and Ben Shahn, who created a famous series of twenty-three gouache paintings about the trials. Whether Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent or guilty has never been thoroughly established, but the fairness of their trials has been thoroughly discredited.

“[T]he greatest moral disaster of many years, fraught with terrible consequences to American justice. . . . when doubt exists it is fighting Providence to commit the irreparable.” —Captain Alfred Dreyfus, New York World